Hello, everyone!
I was lucky enough to get in touch with Wouter, the solo developer behind the Linux game launcher Minigalaxy. He was generous with his time and happy to answer a bunch of random questions I sent his way over the course of a few days. What started as a quick chat turned into this fun little Q&A.
A few hours ago, I posted an article here on Lemmy that used some of his replies as the backbone for a short piece about Minigalaxy. But the more I looked over his answers, the more I felt they deserved to be shared on their own, unedited and in full. So here they are...straight from the source.
I like to do these little Q&A's, interviews and pieces on these projects and programs, because it's a fun chance to get to see what's behind the curtain - hear from the devs which you rarely get to.
Minigalaxy itself is a lightweight, open-source game launcher for Linux, designed specifically for running GOG games with ease. It keeps things simple and streamlined: no bloat, just the basics like installing, updating, and launching your games.
I hope you might enjoy these, it was a fun time, and Minigalaxy itself is a great little Linux program :)
All questions by me, and all answers are by wouter!
Minigalaxy:
Q. I'd like to start with what inspired you to create Minigalaxy? Was it the 'typical' reason? - I know that everyone (do you know Lignuin from Heroic? I'd say you do, he and I both think that GOG's own Galaxy 2.0 is essentially abandoned now) is dissatisfied with the software GOG themselves present.
A. So I wrote Minigalaxy at at time where Lutris was the only other option, but it wasn't as easy to use as I'd like. I also wanted to do a project using python, since that language was still quite new to me. So I decided to write my own client. The idea was to have my own easy to use GOG specific launcher. The initial version was a bit rough and still saw some crashes, but it got better over time. In the beginning I was only planning to make it able to install Linux games, but then it ended up taking off and people started contributing. A contributor who's account name on GitHub is Kzimir wrote the initial wine support.
Q. Minigalaxy seems to be known for its minimalism. Was that a deliberate design choice from the start? I'm a big fan of that, by the way!
A. It was deliberate, I wanted a good overview of the GOG games I can play and an easy way to install them π
Q. Why focus solely on GOG support, instead of building a more universal launcher?
A. In the last 6 years I've contributed to a lot of open source projects, but the only launchers I've been using have been Steam and Minigalaxy, so I've not really ran into an opportunity to contribute to other launchers. Besides Minigalaxy I spend a lot of time contributing to PSPDEV, which is a homebrew SDK for the Playstation Portable, and to open source games and game preservation projects.
I think other launchers do a great job integrating multiple platforms. I really like that Minigalaxy is so focused specifically on GOG. I think that gives it its own niche and allows us to offer a level of uniformity while still providing a lot of specific info from GOG. For example filtering on genre would be hard if you're dealing with multiple platforms
Wouter's unprompted statement:
I do have to say that I was not expecting as much community engagement as there has been when I originally started. It was initially just something I wanted to have, but also made available to others. Then when I implemented translation support the contributions really started rolling in and even some programmers joined and added features I wouldn't have thought about. Lately GB609 on Github came in an he fixed most of the outstanding bugs. It has been really cool to work with the over 50 contributors over the years
I recently made translation easier by adding support for Weblate and we now have a 100% complete Ukrainian translation which we didn't have before. It's things like that which just blow me away
To give another example, being able to ship a full Taiwanese Mandarin translation with the third release I did was unexpected, but insanely cool
Q. How has the Linux/GOG gaming community responded to Minigalaxy?
A. The community has been really nice πThey've really helped to keep me going. Minigalaxy has had so many contributions from the community. Translation, small fixes on the website and even new features and bug fixes
Q. What keeps you motivated to maintain the project?
A. I think that has been my main drive. Minigalaxy has had the features I want from it for a while now, but the community keeps bringing in new ideas and even implementing them
Q. Is there any way people can support you β contributing code, donations, spreading the word?
A. I don't want donations, but contributions are always welcome. It is now super easy to contributed translations, I think it would be really nice if some more people could help out with that π
And that's that!
It was short, but their time is valuable, and this was more a chat than a full-blown interview. I am very glad wouter agreed to chat at all: projects like Minigalaxy, which are done free for the community who love gaming are amazing, and I think he deserved a little time to share his views!
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If you're more interested in Minigalaxy, you can find the GitHub page here!
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And of course, the Discord server link is here too, if you want to join in on the chats!
I do hope you'll forgive me posting the entirety in full here, so soon after my other link. And I hope you enjoyed this little post also!
